The Wisdom of Father Brown

By G. K. Chesterton and Otto Penzler

Criminals beware—there is no eluding the extraordinary mind of Father Brown

Dr. Orion Hood is one of the eminent thinkers of his day, a psychologist whose expert opinion on human nature is sometimes sought by the police. Usually, he is called on to solve only the most spectacular crimes—a nobleman murdered, a diplomat poisoned—but today a more ordinary problem presents itself. An amiable little priest named Father Brown asks Dr. Hood to help a young couple whose families do not want them to marry. Suspicions about the would-be groom abound—dynamite is thought to be his weapon of choice—but Father Brown hopes that Dr. Hood will be able to put the accusations to rest. In the end, however, it is the humble clergyman who picks through the towering evidence of guilt to ensure that love prevails.
 
In this masterful collection of mysteries, including “The Paradise of Thieves,” “The Mistake of the Machine,” and “The Man in the Passage,” Father Brown employs his amazing intuition, developed over years of listening to men confess their sins, to solve crimes large and small. One of the most beloved heroes in all of detective fiction, this unassuming parish priest is as dedicated to the cause of justice as he is to his faith.  
 
This ebook features a new introduction by Otto Penzler and has been professionally proofread to ensure accuracy and readability on all devices.

• Language: English
• Publisher: MysteriousPress.com Open Road
• Release date: Aug 26, 2014
• ISBN: 9781497659827

G. K. Chesterton

G.K. Chesterton (1874–1936) was an English writer, philosopher and critic known for his creative wordplay. Born in London, Chesterton attended St. Paul’s School before enrolling in the Slade School of Fine Art at University College. His professional writing career began as a freelance critic where he focused on art and literature. He then ventured into fiction with his novels The Napoleon of Notting Hill and The Man Who Was Thursday as well as a series of stories featuring Father Brown.

Book preview

Introduction

With one of the most diverse and multitalented backgrounds of anyone during his lifetime, Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874–1936) was equally adept at being an artist and illustrator, critic, essayist, journalist, poet, short story writer, and novelist. However, for all the success and acclaim he enjoyed during his most productive years, he is remembered today mainly for his books about one of the most beloved detective characters of all time: Father Brown.

Born to a wealthy Londoner and his Scottish French Swiss wife, Chesterton studied art and literature at University College London. During his school years, he met E.C. Bentley, who became a lifelong friend. While working for various newspapers and magazines as a literary critic and contributor, he made many intellectual friends, notably Hilaire Belloc, with whom he shared religious and liberal political beliefs.

Chesterton’s prolific pen produced literally thousands of poems, reviews, stories, and essays on literature, politics (he advocated distributism rather than socialism, calling for the widest possible ownership of property), religion (a converted and extremely devout Catholic, he believed that religion was the world’s only refuge), and any other subject that he could, by means of his diverse background, fit into his view of the cosmos. Unfailingly witty, he was a popular speaker and a beloved personality, even among those people who resented his anti-Semitism and artificial, puerile philosophy. He married Frances Blogg in 1901 and gave up the city life and literary gatherings he loved, moving to the country to please her.

Regardless of his versatility and prolificacy, Chesterton’s finest and most enduring books are his mystery and detective tales. In addition to Father Brown, whose exploits border on the occult and fantastic with little pure detection, Chesterton created several interesting characters.

Horne Fisher is a gentleman-detective and profound student of criminology who believes that evildoers should be brought to justice. Burning with passion for truth and honor, he is adept at ferreting out the secrets of little-publicized crimes; yet the criminals who perpetrate them are never punished. His unusual exploits are collected in The Man Who Knew Too Much.

The Club of Queer Trades, Chesterton’s first attempt at mystery fiction, is about an English club with one membership requirement: No one is eligible unless he has created a brand-new profession. Some mysterious adventures involve a man who offers himself to dinner hosts as a butt for repartee; another who provides a suitable romance for lonely souls; and the founder of the club, who earns his living by seeking new members.

In The Man Who Was Thursday, an allegorical novel disguised as a detective story, poet Gabriel Syme, a member of a new force called philosophical policemen, is thrown into a mad, upside-down world as he becomes involved with a group of anarchists known as the Supreme Council of Seven, each member of which is named for a day of the week.

All Chesterton’s novels and stories are humorous and display his kindliness and love of humanity, with his religious and social philosophy appearing at frequent intervals. His love of paradox, his whimsicality, and his sense of the absurd are evident in countless narratives.

Father Brown

Ellery Queen, an extremely distinguished critic of mystery stories as well as one of the most successful writers of detective fiction who ever lived, ranked Father Brown along with C. Auguste Dupin and Sherlock Holmes as one of the three greatest detectives in literature. Father Brown is a quiet, gentle, commonplace Roman Catholic priest who views wrongdoers as souls needing salvation, not criminals to be brought to justice. He has a face as round and dull as a Norfolk dumpling … eyes as empty as the North Sea … several brown paper parcels, which he was quite incapable of collecting … a large, shabby umbrella, which constantly fell on the floor. He is even given the harmless, human name of Brown.

He appears dull-witted before his adversaries but possesses a sharp, subtle, sensitive mind. There is no police procedure in Father Brown’s life; the police, in fact, often make no appearance at all since his sympathies lie with the criminals, and he frequently allows them to go free in the hope that they will repent and reform. The kindly priest does not rely on cold logic and accumulated clues to catch his man. He uses a psychological approach, aided by his deep understanding of human nature.

Father Brown explains his method this way: I am always inside a man, moving his arms and legs; but I wait till I know I am inside a murderer, thinking his thoughts, wrestling with his passions; till I have bent myself into the posture of his hunched and peering hatred … till I am really a murderer … and when I am quite sure that I feel like the murderer, of course I know who he is.

His greatest success comes with Flambeau, who first appears as an adversary. A colossus of crime, a Frenchman of gigantic stature, incredible strength, and blazing intelligence, and a master of disguise, he is the most famous thief in Europe until he matches wits with Father Brown in The Blue Cross (1911). Bested, he reforms and begins his private detective agency under the priest’s guidance. Flambeau’s constant nemesis during his criminal days was Aristide Valentin, chief of the Paris police, an eccentric Frenchman whose success seems magical but is merely the result of plodding logic.

Father Brown’s first name remains a mystery. It is obliquely mentioned but twice in the fifty-one stories in which he appears: in The Sign of the Broken Sword (1911), he is referred to as Paul; in The Eye of Apollo (1911), as the Reverend J. Brown, attached to St. Francis Xavier Church, Camberwell.

The Father Brown stories are uniformly good-humored and nonviolent, despite an abundance of corpses. The later tales have less and less detection, serving largely as springboards for Chesterton’s religious philosophy.

The good-hearted little Essex clergyman was patterned after Father John O’Connor, a real-life priest whom Chesterton knew.

Films

Father Brown has appeared in films made in several countries; for example, Heinz Rühmann portrayed him in two German melodramas in the 1960s. Also, Kenneth More starred as the priest in a British television series in 1973.

Father Brown, Detective. Paramount, 1934. Walter Connolly, Paul Lukas, Gertrude Michael, Halliwell Hobbes. Directed by Edward Sedgwick. A village priest attempts to rehabilitate a master jewel thief (Lukas) who has given him advance warning that he will steal a diamond-encrusted cross from the church.

Father Brown (US release title: The Detective). Columbia (British), 1954. Alec Guinness, Joan Greenwood, Peter Finch, Cecil Parker, Bernard Lee, Sidney James, Ernest Thesiger. Directed by Robert Hamer. Impish Father Brown, who returns goods stolen by light-fingered converts, crosses the English Channel to foil the theft of a sacred cross by a master criminal (Finch) disguised as a priest, and to reform him.

Otto Penzler

ONE — The Absence of Mr Glass

THE consulting-rooms of Dr Orion Hood, the eminent criminologist and specialist in certain moral disorders, lay along the sea-front at Scarborough, in a series of very large and well-lighted French windows, which showed the North Sea like one endless outer wall of blue-green marble. In such a place the sea had something of the monotony of a blue-green dado: for the chambers themselves were ruled throughout by a terrible tidiness not unlike the terrible tidiness of the sea. It must not be supposed that Dr Hood’s apartments excluded luxury, or even poetry. These things were there, in their place; but one felt that they were never allowed out of their place. Luxury was there: there stood upon a special table eight or ten boxes of the best cigars; but they were built upon a plan so that the strongest were always nearest the wall and the mildest nearest the window. A tantalus containing three kinds of spirit, all of a liqueur excellence, stood always on this table of luxury; but the fanciful have asserted that the whisky, brandy, and rum seemed always to stand at the same level. Poetry was there: the left-hand corner of the room was lined with as complete a set of English classics as the right hand could show of English and foreign physiologists. But if one took a volume of Chaucer or Shelley from that rank, its absence irritated the mind like a gap in a man’s front teeth. One could not say the books were never read; probably they were, but there was a sense of their being chained to their places, like the Bibles in the old churches. Dr Hood treated his private book-shelf as if it were a public library. And if this strict scientific intangibility steeped even the shelves laden with lyrics and ballads and the tables laden with drink and tobacco, it goes without saying that yet more of such heathen holiness protected the other shelves that held the specialist’s library, and the other tables that sustained the frail and even fairylike instruments of chemistry or mechanics.

Dr Hood paced the length of his string of apartments, bounded—as the boys’ geographies say—on the east by the North Sea and on the west by the serried ranks of his sociological and criminologist library. He was clad in an artist’s velvet, but with none of an artist’s negligence; his hair was heavily shot with grey, but growing thick and healthy; his face was lean, but sanguine and expectant. Everything about him and his room indicated something at once rigid and restless, like that great northern sea by which (on pure principles of hygiene) he had built his home.

Fate, being in a funny mood, pushed the door open and introduced into those long, strict, sea-flanked apartments one who was perhaps the most startling opposite of them and their master. In answer to a curt but civil summons, the door opened inwards and there shambled into the room a shapeless little figure, which seemed to find its own hat and umbrella as unmanageable as a mass of luggage. The umbrella was a black and prosaic bundle long past repair; the hat was a broad-curved black hat, clerical but not common in England; the man was the very embodiment of all that is homely and helpless.

The doctor regarded the new-comer with a restrained astonishment, not unlike that he would have shown if some huge but obviously harmless sea-beast had crawled into his room. The new-comer regarded the doctor with that beaming but breathless geniality which characterizes a corpulent charwoman who has just managed to stuff herself into an omnibus. It is a rich confusion of social self-congratulation and bodily disarray. His hat tumbled to the carpet, his heavy umbrella slipped between his knees with a thud; he reached after the one and ducked after the other, but with an unimpaired smile on his round face spoke simultaneously as follows:

My name is Brown. Pray excuse me. I’ve come about that business of the MacNabs. I have heard, you often help people out of such troubles. Pray excuse me if I am wrong.

By this time he had sprawlingly recovered the hat, and made an odd little bobbing bow over it, as if setting everything quite right.

I hardly understand you, replied the scientist, with a cold intensity of manner. I fear you have mistaken the chambers. I am Dr Hood, and my work is almost entirely literary and educational. It is true that I have sometimes been consulted by the police in cases of peculiar difficulty and importance, but—

Oh, this is of the greatest importance, broke in the little man called Brown. Why, her mother won’t let them get engaged. And he leaned back in his chair in radiant rationality.

The brows of Dr Hood were drawn down darkly, but the eyes under them were bright with something that might be anger or might be amusement. And still, he said, I do not quite understand.

You see, they want to get married, said the man with the clerical hat. Maggie MacNab and young Todhunter want to get married. Now, what can be more important than that?

The great Orion Hood’s scientific triumphs had deprived him of many things—some said of his health, others of his God; but they had not wholly despoiled him of his sense of the absurd. At the last plea of the ingenuous priest a chuckle broke out of him from inside, and he threw himself into an arm-chair in an ironical attitude of the consulting physician.

Mr Brown, he said gravely, it is quite fourteen and a half years since I was personally asked to test a personal problem: then it was the case of an attempt to poison the French President at a Lord Mayor’s Banquet. It is now, I understand, a question of whether some friend of yours called Maggie is a suitable fiancée for some friend of hers called Todhunter. Well, Mr Brown, I am a sportsman. I will take it on. I will give the MacNab family my best advice, as good as I gave the French Republic and the King of England—no, better: fourteen years better. I have nothing else to do this afternoon. Tell me your story.

The little clergyman called Brown thanked him with unquestionable warmth, but still with a queer kind of simplicity. It was rather as if he were thanking a stranger in a smoking-room for some trouble in passing the matches, than as if he were (as he was) practically thanking the Curator of Kew Gardens for coming with him into a field to find a four-leaved clover. With scarcely a semi-colon after his hearty thanks, the little man began his recital:

I told you my name was Brown; well, that’s the fact, and I’m the priest of the little Catholic Church I dare say you’ve seen beyond those straggly streets, where the town ends towards the north. In the last and straggliest of those streets which runs along the sea like a sea-wall there is a very honest but rather sharp-tempered member of my flock, a widow called MacNab. She has one daughter, and she lets lodgings, and between her and the daughter, and between her and the lodgers—well, I dare say there is a great deal to be said on both sides. At present she has only one lodger, the young man called Todhunter; but he has given more trouble than all the rest, for he wants to marry the young woman of the house.

And the young woman of the house, asked Dr Hood, with huge and silent amusement, what does she want?

Why, she wants to marry him, cried Father Brown, sitting up eagerly. That is just the awful complication.

It is indeed a hideous enigma, said Dr Hood.

This young James Todhunter, continued the cleric, is a very decent man so far as I know; but then nobody knows very much. He is a bright, brownish little fellow, agile like a monkey, clean-shaven like an actor, and obliging like a born courtier. He seems to have quite a pocketful of money, but nobody knows what his trade is. Mrs MacNab, therefore (being of a pessimistic turn), is quite sure it is something dreadful, and probably connected with dynamite. The dynamite must be of a shy and noiseless sort, for the poor fellow only shuts himself up for several hours of the day and studies something behind a locked door. He declares his privacy is temporary and justified, and promises to explain before the wedding. That is all that anyone knows for certain, but Mrs MacNab will tell you a great deal more than even she is certain of. You know how the tales grow like grass on such a patch of ignorance as that. There are tales of two voices heard talking in the room; though, when the door is opened, Todhunter is always found alone. There are tales of a mysterious tall man in a silk hat, who once came out of the sea-mists and apparently out of the sea, stepping softly across the sandy fields and through the small back garden at twilight, till he was heard talking to the lodger at his open window. The colloquy seemed to end in a quarrel. Todhunter dashed down his window with violence, and the man in the high hat melted into the sea-fog again. This story is told by the family with the fiercest mystification; but I really think Mrs MacNab prefers her own original tale: that the Other Man (or whatever it is) crawls out every night from the big box in the corner, which is kept locked all day. You see, therefore, how this sealed door of Todhunter’s is treated as the gate of all the fancies and monstrosities of the ‘Thousand and One Nights’. And yet there is the little fellow in his respectable black jacket, as punctual and innocent as a parlour clock. He pays his rent to the tick; he is practically a teetotaller; he is tirelessly kind with the younger children, and can keep them amused for a day on end; and, last and most urgent of all, he has made himself equally popular with the eldest daughter, who is ready to go to church with him tomorrow.

A man warmly concerned with any large theories has always a relish for applying them to any triviality. The great specialist having condescended to the priest’s simplicity, condescended expansively. He settled himself with comfort in his arm-chair and began to talk in the tone of a somewhat absent-minded lecturer:

Even in a minute instance, it is best to look first to the main tendencies of Nature. A particular flower may not be dead in early winter, but the flowers are dying; a particular pebble may never be wetted with the tide, but the tide is coming in. To the scientific eye all human history is a series of collective movements, destructions or migrations, like the massacre of flies in winter or the return of birds in spring. Now the root fact in all history is Race. Race produces religion; Race produces legal and ethical wars. There is no stronger case than that of the wild, unworldly and perishing stock which we commonly call the Celts, of whom your friends the MacNabs are specimens. Small, swarthy, and of this dreamy and drifting blood, they accept easily the superstitious explanation of any incidents, just as they still accept (you will excuse me for saying) that superstitious explanation of all incidents which you and your Church represent. It is not remarkable that such people, with the sea moaning behind them and the Church (excuse me again) droning in front of them, should put fantastic features into what are probably plain events. You, with your small parochial responsibilities, see only this particular Mrs MacNab, terrified with this particular tale of two voices and a tall man out of the sea. But the man with the scientific imagination sees, as it were, the whole clans of MacNab scattered over the whole world, in its ultimate average as uniform as a tribe of birds. He sees thousands of Mrs MacNabs, in thousands of houses, dropping their little drop of morbidity in the tea-cups of their friends; he sees—

Before the scientist could conclude his sentence, another and more impatient summons sounded from without; someone with swishing skirts was marshalled hurriedly down the corridor, and the door opened on a young girl, decently dressed but disordered and red-hot with haste. She had sea-blown blonde hair, and would have been entirely beautiful if her cheekbones had not been, in the Scotch manner, a little high in relief as well as in colour. Her apology was almost as abrupt as a command.

I’m sorry to interrupt you, sir, she said, but I had to follow Father Brown at once; it’s nothing less than life or death.

Father Brown began to get to his feet in some disorder. Why, what has happened, Maggie? he said.

James has been murdered, for all I can make out, answered the girl, still breathing hard from her rush. That man Glass has been with him again; I heard them talking through the door quite plain. Two separate voices: for James speaks low, with a burr, and the other voice was high and quavery.

That man Glass? repeated the priest in some perplexity.

I know his name is Glass, answered the girl, in great impatience. I heard it through the door. They were quarrelling—about money, I think—for I heard James say again and again, ‘That’s right, Mr Glass,’ or ‘No, Mr Glass,’ and then, ‘Two or three, Mr Glass.’ But we’re talking too much; you must come at once, and there may be time yet.

But time for what? asked Dr Hood, who had been studying the young lady with marked interest. What is there about Mr Glass and his money troubles that should impel such urgency?

I tried to break down the door and couldn’t, answered the girl shortly, Then I ran to the back-yard, and managed to climb on to the window-sill that looks into the room. It was all dim, and seemed to be empty, but I swear I saw James lying huddled up in a corner, as if he were drugged or strangled.

This is very serious, said Father Brown, gathering his errant hat and umbrella and standing up; in point of fact I was just putting your case before this gentleman, and his view—

Has been largely altered, said the scientist gravely. I do not think this young lady is so Celtic as I had supposed. As I have nothing else to do, I will put on my hat and stroll down town with you.

In a few minutes all three were approaching the dreary tail of the MacNabs’ street: the girl with the stern and breathless stride of the mountaineer, the criminologist with a lounging grace (which was not without a certain leopard-like swiftness), and the priest at an

Reviews for The Wisdom of Father Brown

[livingoakheart_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Very insightful look at the human state.

[sueincyprus · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Read on my Kindle, although I have a paperback edition too. Twelve short stories; not crime fiction, exactly, as the solution of most of the cases rely on local knowledge and insight. Instead they're character-based, featuring the delightful and unassuming Father Brown, a Catholic priest in the early part of the 20th century. Long-winded at times, relying too much on politics and intrigue, but with believable conversations and clever plots. Father Brown is gifted with a great deal of intuition and logical deduction, and I enjoyed (on the whole) following his thought processes.I would have rated this book with four stars, but I was shocked by chapter nine, which is on the topic of boxing (a subject I abhor) and - worse - peppered with racist language. Perhaps it wasn't considered offensive over a hundred years ago but I very much hope modern editions have modified or even removed this chapter. Still, the other eleven chapters, if a bit wordy, are worth reading in odd moments if you like short stories of this genre.

[elizajane_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Reason for Reading: Next in the series.This second collection of Fr. Brown lacks the appeal of the first collection. I enjoyed some stories, but found many to be disappointing in that they were short of being actual mysteries in the sense that I had expected them to be. Sometimes crimes were not really even committed and Fr. Brown was presented with more of a puzzle or conundrum to solve. When there is a crime the story will finish with Brown's solution and the police or any legal justice is hardly called to hand, something I'm finding difficult to get used to with these stories from both volumes so far. These stories are incredibly less religious in nature than the first volume though they all do carry a religious moral ethic as that is the nature of Fr. Brown's sleuthing methods. I was disappointed that Flambeau was rarely seen in this collection as I had come to consider him Brown's sidekick in the first volume but at least the narration has settled it's tone from the first and is written purely in the third person throughout these stories. An acceptable and entertaining read but nowhere near as good as "The Innocence of Father Brown". Chesterton, in real life, had still not converted to Catholicism at the point when these stories were published and I am interested to see if there will be any noticeable difference in the next volume which was published four years after his conversion.1. The Absence of Mr. Glass - What a fantastic story to start this collection! Not a mystery though by any means, more of a puzzle, a conundrum. Fr. Brown goes to a detective to enlist his services to help determine whether a young man is suitable to marry a young woman known to him. Her mother is dead-set against the marriage as the suitor has a bit of mystery surrounding him, yet everyone else concerned is happy for the young lovers. As the party descends upon young Mr. Todhunter's rooms, they have need to break down the door upon which they find him bound and gagged in the corner. The detective then takes the disarray of the room into account and tells the nefarious doings of the young man and the mystery of one Mr. Glass. When he is finished Fr. Brown laughs and from the clues tells all the truth of what has happened and whether Mr. Todhunter is a suitable suitor or not. Very clever and a delight to read! 5/52. The Paradise of Thieves - I don't have a lot to say on this one. I've been busy and couldn't get my mind onto it; whether it was me or the story I can't say for sure. However, it wasn't terribly entertaining and I never had a great sense of what was going on or cared for that matter. It involved a kidnapping. 3/53. The Duel of Dr. Hirsch - Another story that didn't quite satisfy, very political. Early on reference is made to another case which I ignored but repeated mention of this case made me google it to see if it was a true crime and indeed it was happening about 20 years prior to the publishing of this book. Perhaps if one were up on these current events at the time the story would have been more enjoyable? However, it wasn't pertinent to the case presented here in its outcome and I was rather disappointed to have figured out the twist before the end. This story does at least bring Flambeau back into the picture. Hoping the next story will be better. 2.5/54. The Man in the Passage - Finally, a proper mystery! Fr. Brown is in fine form in this story. He arrives backstage at the Apollo Theatre where the star actress has called him to attend to her. There he finds her in the company of four others: two suitors, her leading man and her male servant. Miss Rome is obviously anxious to speak to Fr. and uses her charms to clear the room. As she sees one man out of the building she is heard walking down the passage to watch his progress down the street then a scream and kerfuffle is heard and the two suitors are heard exclaiming about seeing a man in the passage. Poor Miss Rome is found dead, the leading man is obviously arrested as the killer but it is upon the witness stand that Fr. Brown unravels the simple events of that evening proclaiming whom both the man in the passage and the killer each were. I liked that the killer received their just rewards in this case, even if it was in a round about way. (4/5)5. The Mistake of the Machine - Well this is a funny tale involving, in a round about way, a wealthy man who holds obscurely themed parties each year. Starting off with a police detective telling Fr. Brown of a murder the previous evening of a warden after a prisoner escaped and his subsequent arrest of the culprit, a shabbily dressed man running across a nearby field. His guilt is all but proven to the detective by the use of his highly prized "psychometric" machine which measures the variations in one's pulse and thus can tell if a person is under stress and agitated during questioning. Fr. Brown is quite witty with his observations about the machine vs its operator and quite blows apart the detective's story. Though the detective has indeed caught a criminal it is not the one he thinks he has and Fr. Brown solves both the identity of the apprehended man and the true perpetrator of the prison escape and murder of the warden. A clever tale with an ending that surprised me. (4/5)6. The Head of Caesar - Not quite a proper mystery in the ordinary sense but a crime and a puzzle that Fr. Brown wittily solves again. I really enjoyed this story and it is unique in it's telling. Flambeau is present at the beginning and end but doesn't play a major role. Most of the story takes place in a pub as a woman confesses her entire story to Fr. while the rest plays out at the scene of the crime where Brown wraps up the final pieces. A story of its time but good. (5/5)7. The Purple Wig - Another fine puzzle mystery though no actual crime is committed again. This time it's more of a moral conundrum and this case takes on the British aristocracy and class system of the early 1900s. A journalist happens upon a table outside a pub finding three men, a doctor, a priest and an otherwise respectable gentleman other than his purplish wig. Here they converse and the topic turns to the old tales and curse of the Dukes of Exmoor. I won't say more but a twist in the middle turns into a double twist at the end for a fun story. Though again, not really a mystery. (4/5)8. The Perishing of the Pendragons - The last few stories have been following a similar format and this one is no different. Brown and Flambeau are on a small holiday for Brown's health; he is suffering depression. They are taking a river cruise to the Pendragon estates and regaled with the family's legend which includes the mysterious burning tower. Brown just happens to have a hose in hand when the tower really starts to burn and the Father unravels the legend of yore and the current use of the legend. Again not exactly what I consider a mystery (ie no crime to solve) but Fr. does stop a crime from being committed and solve another puzzle. Not as entertaining as others but ok. Finally some good Brown/Flambeau interaction which is sorely lacking in this collection. (3/5)9. The God of the Gongs - I'm the last person to judge a story based on modern society's views on certain elements such as race and sexism and always view a story from within the time period it was written. However, I could find no redeeming value in this story. To begin with it was a less than entertaining mystery and blatantly racist against the "negro" race. The n-word was used frequently and flippantly. I admit my disgust with the racism and rampant blatant derogatory references made me hurry and get this one over with; I really could not find that it was even trying to be positive within the constraints of the time it was written. In my opinion, this is a racist story even for the time period in which it was written. (0/5)10. The Salad of Colonel Cray - Finally a genuine mystery and a fun one at that! A burglary takes place and only condiments seem to have been stolen. But when someone is poisoned it is Fr. Brown who happens to have the simple remedy to the rare poison just in the nick of time. (4/5)11. The Strange Crime of John Boulnois - Rumours of a woman having an affair with a man abound and when he is stabbed and publicly found with his dying breath accuses the scorned husband John Boulnois the crime appears to be fait au complete. However, the priest on hand, Fr. Brown, takes one look around and knows all is not as it appears. Clever tale; the motives are old-fashionably unbelievable but nonetheless a good story. (4/5)12. The Fairy Tale of Father Brown - For the final tale in this book it is nice to have Flambeau return. But once again this is not really a crime or a mystery as one expects. As in a previous story we are presented with a mysterious death from the past. Flambeau recounts the details as they were given him by one of the investigating detectives at the time. A prince had been found dead with a bullet in his head and yet there had been no shot fired and only a bullet mark found upon his cravat. After hearing the details of the strange tale, Fr. Brown is able to tell his version of what most likely happened; who the guilty party was and who it wasn't are quite interesting to say the least. A good story to end the volume. (4/5)

[mrslee_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I rank these stories right up there with Agatha Christie's. Something I can always pick up and enjoy reading. I love Father Brown and his simple way of getting to the heart of things, despite appearances. The short story format was perfect for my reading habits at the moment. It was a bit dismaying to read some of the stories about "swarthy foreigners," and I wonder if the opinion expressed was Chesterton's own, or if he was simply mirroring the common voice of the times in his tales.

[annbury_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Chesterton's "Father Brown" stories were landmarks in the history of detective fiction, and still make good reading today -- if you make allowances for the prejudices of the age in which he wrote.

[bookishbat · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

I've only read one Father Brown short story before this, and was very much enjoying the others. And then I had to come abruptly into the racism in the story The God of the Gongs. If it hadn't been for that story I could have rated this a lot higher, rather than sitting and pondering the casual racism of the time - 1910 for this collection. The one story almost made me want to rate the whole as a one star - but to be fair, that's based on that one story, and how angry it made me. (I've been waffling between two and three stars for this, and it's completely hinging on my reaction to that one story.)

As an aside I should mention that it's not that I'm not used to racism in stories from this time, sadly. In fact I often wonder if, when some schools/parents raise issues about teaching Huckleberry Finn if the teachers shouldn't have students read some of the era's stories with overt and casual racism that have characters much less well developed than Jim. As much as I dislike it, I don't think we should refrain from making it clear that these thoughts/attitudes/stereotypes were in a lot of the literature. There are a a few authors I still enjoy despite their racism - Lovecraft for instance - but that doesn't mean I don't stop and cringe every time it comes up, even if I expect it. I just can't overlook this, even with the (poor) excuse of "that's the way everyone wrote/thought." When no, not everyone did. So there's the struggle - you can't exactly avoid it, but you - well, I - certainly can't enjoy it.

While several of the other stories have Italian or French characters that are stereotypical, the black characters of The God of the Gongs are much, much worse. It's not just the repeated use of the word nigger (or the fact that one character's name is Nigger Ned) - it's the way all the black characters are described.

(72% in) "...He was buttoned and buckled up to his bursting eyeballs in the most brilliant fashion. A tall black hat was tilted on his broad black head - a hat of the sort that the French wit has compared to eight mirrors. But somehow the black man was like the black hat. He also was black, and yet his glossy skin flung back the light at eight angles or more. It is needless to say that he wore white spats and a white slip inside his waistcoat. The red flower stood up in his button hole aggressively, as if it had suddenly grown there. And in the way he carried his cane in one hand and his cigar in the other there was a certain attitude - an attitude we must always remember when we talk of racial prejudices: something innocent and insolent - the cake walk.

"Sometimes," said Flambeau, looking after him, "I'm not surprised that they lynch them." "

If you can't understand why, after reading the quote, there were numerous things there that pissed me off - well, I can't help you. Besides the stereotypes in the description of dress there's the concept that you can wear clothes and walk in a way which supposedly everyone reads as insolent. And the line about lynching - just, no. Sorry, can't deal with the illogic and unfairness of this portrayal.

It doesn't make it any better that Father Brown is given a speech or two which I'm going to assume is supposed to preach tolerance:

(76% in) "...I dare say he has some Italians with him, but our amiable friends are not Italians. They are octoroons and African half-bloods of various shades, but I fear we English think all foreigners are much the same so long as they are dark and dirty. Also," he added, with a smile, "I fear the English decline to draw any fine distinction between the moral character produced by my religion and that which blooms out of Voodoo."

I get the attempted message here - but after the previous quote, plus more I've not quoted, it's not enough. The ugliness of "everyone thinks this way" blots out any message of tolerance. Especially when the end of the story has to do with all blacks in the UK being under suspicion of the law and the public because of the murders by a group. Trying to preach tolerance in this context makes Chesterton seem smug, self-satisfied and completely unaware of how much stronger the stereotypes are than the platitudes.

I enjoy the way Chesterton writes, but I'm not totally sold on the character of Brown (I got tired of the repeated descriptions of how "child-like" he is). Still if anything keeps me from finishing the rest of Chesterton (I have several more ebooks) it will be the bad impressions of this one story. It's going to take me a while to get those images out of my head.